ABSTRACT
Almost from the very outset, analysts sought to explain emerging patterns of political competition after the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe as a product of history and historical legacies. Early hypotheses included the ‘unfreezing’ of pre-communist traditions and divisions; an unstable politics of populism and anomie rooted in the social levelling and culture of distrust engendered by failed one-party regimes (Jowitt 1992); or a varied set of sub-cultures each shaped by different aspects of the pre-communist and communist past (Korosényi 1991; Schöpflin 1993; Janos 1994). In this chapter, I seek to examine the historical origins of the post-1989 Czech right and to relate them to such analyses. In doing so, I will suggest that even the most sophisticated historical legacy approach, that developed by Herbert Kitschelt and his collaborators, faces significant difficulties in formulating a convincingly ‘deep’ historical explanation linking historical pathways and legacies to post-communist party politics. Kitschelt’s work, I will suggest, tends to overemphasize aspects of classical political and social modernization familiar from a West European context, neglecting the impact of external, geo-political influences and the crosscutting effects of ethnicity and nationalism. Moreover, I will argue, detailed examination of the historical record highlights important historical breaks and moments of contingency that Kitschelt’s account glosses over. Ultimately, I will suggest, the case of the Czech right demonstrates that a strongly determined historical path to patterns of left-right politics after 1989 can sometimes only convincingly be traced from the late communist period following the collapse of Czechoslovak reform communism in 1968-9.
